From Meddling to Preaching

Three Ways to Expose the Partly Natural Family by David Mills

When a pastor says something in a sermon that you do not like, goes the old joke, he has “gone from preaching to meddling.” He has stopped telling pleasant and comforting stories (or enjoyably convicting stories about the sins you don’t commit) and started interfering with your life.

Many traditional Christians and cultural conservatives love what the family scholar Allan Carlson has called “the Natural Family” as a theory, because Americans love anything “natural.” It seems more direct, more genuine, more authentic, untainted by commerce and calculation. And it has its political uses: They love to appeal to Nature to argue that homosexuality is unnatural.

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David Mills has been editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things.

more on family from the online archives

31.1—January/February 2018

In Defense of Prudery

The Wisdom of the Victorian Quest for Innocence by David Sandifer

34.1—January/February 2021

Whose Wife Shall She Be?

Jesus' Astonishing Other Teaching on Marriage by James Ware

33.2—March/April 2020

Christian Pro-Family Governments?

Old & New Lessons from Europe—from the 2019 Touchstone Conference by Allan C. Carlson

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